Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [49]
Proust, who through ill health was forced to lie utterly still in bed for hours on end meditating on his life, was naturally predisposed to turning the people he knew and the adventures he lived through into glowing legends. Because he was so determined to disguise his own homosexuality, he was forced to transpose recalled experiences with men into beguiling tales of the Narrator’s passion for women. This elaborate game of encoding is the creative half of Proust’s effort, the invention added to the data provided by involuntary memory. But as in the case of a good Method actor who builds even the most bizarre characterization on his own concrete and personal sense memories, in the same way Proust’s strategies of disguise and transposition must still begin and end with a highly specific recollection of his own feelings and sensations. In that sense, involuntary memories represent the truth in Proust’s process of composition, the bare face that he must later paint with invention.
Perhaps the theory of the primacy of involuntary memory appeals to readers because it assures us that nothing is ever truly forgotten and that art is nothing but the accumulation of memories. This utterly democratic view that we are all novelists who have been handed by destiny one big book, the story of our lives, appeals to anyone who has ever felt the tug towards self-expression but has feared not being skilled enough to get his feelings down. Of course what Proust leaves out of the equation are three essential things: the fact that he happened to live at one of the highpoints of culture and civilization (if not of literary creation); his natural gifts of eloquence, analysis of psychology, and assimilation of information; and finally his willingness to sacrifice his life to his art. Involuntary memory, without the addition of such gifts and happy circumstances, would probably not be much of a guarantee of artistic excellence. Since Proust possessed such powers in profusion, he could afford to dismiss their importance.
XI
THE INITIAL ATTACKS on Proust were quickly forgotten and the long, slow process of artistic canonization began, with translations into several languages under way and dithyrambic essays rushing into print. But the full impact of Proust’s vision was not realized until 1927 and the publication of the last volume of his massive work—five years after his death. He died in 1922, after The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah had been published, but before the publication of The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927 (as well as Jean Santeuil in 1952, Contre Sainte-Beuve in 1954, and all twenty-one volumes of his letters, brought out between 1970 and 1993).
In the summer of 1918, as the war was approaching its end, Proust was still far from the end of the onerous task he’d set himself. Nor had desire for love or at least male companionship died away. He became enamored of a waiter at the Ritz named Henri Rochat, a handsome Swiss who wanted to be a painter. Soon after Proust met him he insisted that Rochat serve him every time he dined at the Ritz. Then he began to shower him with gifts, especially expensive clothes. As in the days of Agostinelli, Proust was again making vague references in letters to friends of his “great moral grief,” which he was convinced would poison every instant of his life and bring about his death. To his exasperated banker Proust confessed that he had spent about forty thousand dollars on the young person. When the banker suggested that Proust safeguard his remaining fortune (which he had reduced by roughly 25 percent through reckless spending and bad investments) by placing it in such a way that he could